Aaron’s stuff

Austin’s stuff

Click here for a link to Austin's CV, as well as a complete list of his peer-reviewed publications with links to related posts and/or ungated versions (when available).

What Ezekiel Emanuel wants you to read

July 13, 2012 at 12:27 pm

Austin Frakt

I signed up for Zeke Emanuel’s Coursera course Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act. I confess, however, that I’m not keeping up with the lectures. In the comments, steve noted the good resources Emanuel lists for his class. Since very few of you will have signed up for the course, I thought I’d reproduce that list here. I believe it is all ungated/free. Much of it, or similar, has been cited on this blog before. Happy reading.

(Note: Some of these documents are long. Emanuel just assigns portions or the executive summary in some cases. In others he suggests browsing. I deleted his suggestions because I’m not sure if I am really free to share any content of the course here. But providing links to publicly available resources should not be in violation of anything (right?). So that’s all I’m doing. Of course you should read what you like.)

GapMinder World (2012). Find the US on the following graphs by hovering over the circles and compare its performance to other OECD countries (in light green): infant mortality (www.bit.ly/Kpa1h3), life expectancy (www.bit.ly/MSsLuR).

At the risk of sounding like the guy with a hammer who sees every problem as a nail, I will observe that it seems unfortunate that Emanuel does not include any of the Wennberg – Dartmouth Atlas work on unwarranted variation in the discussion of why health care in the US costs so much more than in other 1st-world nations but delivers such mediocre results. Does he, like other MDs, resist the finding that supply often drives demand without necessarily producing better outcomes?